Openings
Middlegame Strategy
Tactics
Endgame
I'm not going to spout off how I think everyone should balance these out but I want to outline what I consider good baseline knowledge/skill and the goals I have for each.
Openings
I want to be able to identify an opening from the first 3-5 moves, so long as it's not some obscure opening. If I see a rossolimo sicilian, a catalan, or a hedgehog I want to be able to say that with confidence. I don't think it's quite valuable yet for me to know the deep plans for each and the 12th move of all variations but if somebody plays c5 to my e4, I want to know two or three good options and what they're called. I think it's good to have that baseline knowledge to springboard my study.
I'm using a reddit post that outlined a bunch of common openings with anywhere from 2 to 5 moves per side. There were a lot of errors but I corrected them and made my own spreadsheet with all moves and the common name of the opening. I've also been adding to that a quick note for memorization. For Evans Gambit for example, I'd write "giuoco piano then b4 from white." I hope to slowly memorize them and be able to belt out the moves on a board. I also want to add in a column for "General Plans" as I go, such as "trade off the light squared bishop and fight for d5" or something similar.
Middlegame Strategy
It's the "What do I do now?" problem. I will have to continue reading The Amateur's Mind for the time being and keep taking notes on it. Equally important, I'll have to analyze my games and master games with these ideas in mind and take note of when I made a good analysis of the position and when I didn't. If I can get out of the opening 49 times out of 50, this and tactics are the things I need to work on most. To work on this though, is a matter of reading material and applying it to my games which is a more typical version of studying I did in school where you're memorizing key concepts until you can apply them in your games (similar to memorizing concepts to apply to an essay or test in school). Therefore this can seem to be a little dry and feel more like work which might be the reason for my avoiding it. Whereas tactics are easier tests that I can do in a few minutes on a phone app....
Tactics
As I've just got back into chess in the last few weeks I've started playing a LOT of tactics apps and using webpages. It all started a month or so ago when I got the Play Magnus app again. I just began playing him at his youngest age to make myself feel better. Then I decided on playing him until I got to 500 points then I'd jump to the next age level. The first few were easy but I'm currently stuck on age 9. If I work hard, I can draw him but I haven't won yet. Anyway, the point is that I made up a little game within the game where I have a goal of a number of points to get to. And that's how we get to tactics. Find a way to turn it into a game to watch your progress over the course of many days, weeks, months. Like what I did with the woodpecker method.
Right now I have an app called "Chess Tactics Pro" and it's just like any old tactics trainer. I dove in and saw that it has 150 "easy" puzzles so I instantly decided I'd solve them all, then go straight back and solve them again, and again and again until I could do it in 20 minutes or so.
Make up games like this and do them. It helps stretch your training over the course of many days or weeks until next thing you know, you're doing tactics every day....which is the idea!
Endgame
Again, like middlegame strategy this is a fair amount of just intaking and memorizing knowledge like how opposition works, how to advance a majority, the lucena position, etc. I am oddly not confident in how opposition works and I don't know why. If the king is in front of the pawns I feel good in telling you if it's winning or not but I need to be able to see this from further out and if the kings are in weird positions (like not in or close to direct opposition). I was given a pdf book called Chess Endgame Training by Bernd Rosen and I recall looking at it briefly a few months ago. It seemed pretty helpful and had loads of examples so I should re-visit that. And continue going through Silman's Endgame Course.
Conclusion
Lastly, it's a matter of playing games and analyzing. And of course making sure I'm using the lessons learned in my tactics training, middlegame and endgame strategy, and opening knowledge to an extent. I think with all these core elements, one could devise a decent study schedule such as Monday is tactics, Tuesday is opening, Wednesday is middlegame, etc. I don't know if I'm organized enough to do that but perhaps I will continue my tactics training hard (1-2 hours a day I think is pretty good) and begin mixing in endgame stuff, Silman's Amateur's Mind book, and random opening memorization which I can probably do during slow times at work.
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